Pre-birthday fun

Saturday April 22, 2006

Spent the day trying to fix the Viet text into Macromedia Freehand issue. Found that I could copy, cut and paste the text from Word into Macromedia Flash, then from Flash into Freehand without it freezing my computer. So I spent the entire day going through that process, paragraph by paragraph – then replacing all the question marks that came through on the tones with normal lettersand reworking the layout to fit the longer Vietnamese text. It took a long time!

Because Suzanne was in town, Candice suggested she cook dinner at home and invite Phil over – sounded like a nice relaxing evening. I went out and about to get a few things in the afternoon and ran into Suzanne at the markets – she had to get more supplies. Dinner had doubled in numbers and a few more people were coming along – so a dinner party it was to be.

Candice is a fantastic cook – she’s very good at it, and exceptionally ingenous with the limited number of cooking gear we have – one frypan, and two saucepans! Cooking for that many people with so few cooking accessories ensured some preplanning and organizing. She made amazing stir-fry noodles with veggies and tofu.


Everyone rocked up around 7pm and we had a great night. The extra people included a guy called Michael and his girlfriend Hanh, along with a long-time friend of Michael’s, Angas. Phil and Michael were AYADS together, but Michael was stationed her in Hanoi while Phil was down in Ho Chi Minh City.

Michael works in Forestries in Halong and Hanh, Hanoi born and bred, works at the British Embassy. Angas works in the environmental field as well, but has been in Laos for a number of years but his work is taking him to Vietnam regularly. So, they bought pre-dinner snacks, Candice cooked dinner and Phil brought desert.



We had dinner downstairs and then proceeded to the loungeroom for a birthday cake! That’s right, they’d organized a birthday cake for me, which was so kind– and delicious I might add. So they sang me happy birthday and I even got to blow out some candles.


Blowing out the candles, and a happy birthday smile

Michael, Phil, Suzanne, me and Angas. Candice with Hanh and Michael.

Phil doing silly close-ups of Candice and I.

I couldn’t have asked for a better, impromptu birthday dinner here in Hanoi, especially as on Friday night I was feeling quite sad that I wasn’t seeing any of my family and friends. Had an awesome time – great company, great food and even some Australian wine – very exciting

After everyone left the phone rang and it was Darlene!!! How wonderful to hear from her.

Went to sleep feeling really happy and also excited about the impending trip tomorrow.